


By Our Works We Shall Destroy the Alien Threat!

by quietprofanity



Series: By Our Works We Shall Destroy the Alien Threat! [1]
Category: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Genre: Dem 2017 Blues, Gen, Multi, Nazis in All But Name, Politics, Racism, anti-Semitism, roman a clef
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2018-05-14
Packaged: 2019-02-01 10:15:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12702831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietprofanity/pseuds/quietprofanity
Summary: In the early months of President B.H. Tannen’s controversial administration, a still-mourning Mina and Orlando fall in with some mad scientist contractors vying for the chance to erect Tannen’s promised country-wide force-field against hostile aliens.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If you’ve happened to wander into this fanfic via one of your favorite characters’ tags, you may be wondering what the hell this all is and why there are SO MANY DAMN TAGS EWW I HATE TOO MANY TAGS. Here’s a brief explanation.
> 
>  _The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen_ is a long-running comic book series from Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill with the underlying premise that all fiction in the world takes place within its universe. However, Moore and O’Neill have always had a penchant for greatly changing and warping whatever source material from which they’re stealing (as well as playing favorites). I may or may not have done something similar here.
> 
> One of their rules that they (mostly) stick to is that a story takes place in the timeline concurrent with its publication date, regardless of what the original canon says. (For example, since _Dracula_ was published in 1897, that’s when the events of the novel took place in the timeline even though the actual canon is ambiguous about the year.) What that basically means is that a lot of characters who were kids or teenagers in their canons that came out in the previous decade are now adults in this fanfic, and may be only somewhat recognizable as the characters they were back then.
> 
> I’m also sticking to the latter books’ choice to slightly change or avoid saying the full names of any characters who are currently under copyright. Sure, it’s a fanfic and I don’t necessarily need to do this but sometimes you gotta follow the aesthetic. Also, I hope this choice will underline the idea that the characters you see here aren’t necessarily the same as those from the original stories (something this fanfic plans to make more explicit as more characters from one canon in particular come into play). But I hope they can be a version of the characters that you can enjoy regardless. And if not, “Just repeat to yourself ‘it’s just a fic -- I should really just relax.’”
> 
> Finally, yes, this is a story with a political agenda. I know a lot of people read fanfic or even consume the original canons for escapism and I respect that, but sometimes you gotta write fanfiction to cope, y’know? I hope even at its most didactic this story remains enjoyable.
> 
> While I’m tagging whoever is going to be a major character, feel free to play the character/reference guessing game for the cameos in the comments. Annotations will come out … eventually. ENJOY!

In a rowdy tavern tucked away in a nondescript California beach town, Mina Murray sat and watched the television, because it was easier to do that than remember that just last year she had come to this country to murder a family.

Then again, most people in America seemed particularly glued to their television sets these days. The patrons at the other end of the bar -- a swarthy hispanic man in a leather jacket and a dour-looking pale woman wearing a cross -- were staring with alcohol-blurred eyes at President B.H. Tannen’s absurd new press secretary. Like most people in the administration, Sal Gudman was an outsider to public office with a vague and sketchy yet somehow not-fully illegitimate resume. The gold pinky ring on his finger -- the perfect accessory to his loud ensemble of a blue pinstriped suit, turquoise shirt and pink paisley tie -- flashed as he talked with his hands to the press.

“Is it so hard to conceive -- to fathom -- that our President might -- just might -- have the best interests of our great nation at heart?” Gudman asked an increasingly restless press pool. “You people, you believe the worst. You want to hear the worst. Quite frankly, it’s disgusting.”

“Um, I asked you a question about the words he actually said, Mr. Gudman,” countered one of the reporters in the press pool -- a thin, white brunette with large dark eyes and a wide pink mouth. “I don’t think even the President’s harshest critics would deny that the Western World has faced extraterrestrial threats since the 19th century, but many aliens currently live and reside in America being peaceful and working productive jobs. And President Tannen’s plan for a country-wide force field has widely been criticized by multiple experts as a huge expense with an unlikely success rate and extraordinary environmental and quality of life impact.”

Gudman actually had a bit of a smile on his face as he shook his head. “And who are these ‘experts,’ anyway? Huh, Andi?”

“Scientists!” Andi exclaimed, practically shaking her notebook as she did so. “Astronauts! Economists!”

“And I am sure -- sure, that we could find our own experts in all of those fields that will tell you the exact opposite.”

“But every single poll --”

“What polls? Your polls? Your news? You see, Ms. Sax -- this is exactly why people don’t trust the media. These experts, these polls, these stories, they can be manipulated to say anything. And all of you --” Gudman waved a finger over the press pool. “-- every single one of your papers have published editorials and fake news calling the President a cheat, a rapist, a liar. The people of this country elected B.H. Tannen to be their president. At what point are you not respecting the will of the people?”

A middle-aged, blonde white woman raised her pen. “Baldwin from the Telegraph. Does the President have any response to Senator Hundred saying he will not vote for the force field? How does this bode for the feud between the Senator and the president?”

Gudman laughed under his breath and waved his hands again. “See? There you go again! What ‘feud’? The President has a wonderful working relationship with his fellow party member.”

“Tannen said that if Hundred was a real hero, he would have stopped both Twin Towers from falling on 9/11.”

“Baldwin, Baldwin, c’mon here. We all know what happens in the campaign stays in the campaign.”

“Just last night Tannen reblogged a Cheeper user questioning if Hundred planned the attack to help his political career.”

“It’s a joke! We all know that the President has a unique sense of humor. That’s why the people love him! He’s not a stuffed shirt like Secretary Nope. Real America loves his Cheeper account.”

Mina heard the woman on the other end of the bar scoff, “Oh my God … where did they find this clown? A used car dealership?”

The hispanic man rolled his eyes and sipped his whiskey. “Didn’t your husband vote for him?”

“Don’t remind me … he even bought one of those stupid hats.” She took another gulp of the wine she was drinking, stopping when a man wearing a colorful cartoon shirt, a rainbow afro and several piercings walked through the door. “Oh, here’s another one.”

The two left to chat the man up. The bartender changed the channel, but the next station had more Tannen news.

“The President may be eyeing a war with North Korea, but has he ended a decades-long music feud?” asked the news anchor -- a big-eyed, heavyset black man with an amused grin. “In response to allegations that his donation to a certain glam rocker’s children’s foundation bounced, Tannen wrote on Cheeper that its founder was, quote ‘Untalented and a liar. B-word never had good music and has aged like milk.’ Hashtag ‘Butthead.’ The 80s star responded on her account @TrulyOutrageous, quote, ‘Almost 50 and still selling out concerts. You couldn’t fill the mall for your inauguration.’ Hashtag ‘YoureTheButthead.’ But the real shocker is that statement was soon re-cheepered by the account @OurSongsAreBetter with, ‘You tell ‘em, sister.’ Hashtag ‘YoureTheButthead.’ Hashtag ‘WeCanAgreeOnThatMuch.’ Maybe this means we’ll see that team-up concert?”

Mina suddenly longed for the days when politicians simply lied about each other in their own private newspaper publications. She supposed it would be funny if it all weren’t so depressing and asinine. Then again, she hadn’t required any outside influence to make her depressed for almost a decade.

A nudge at her elbow broke Mina out of her malaise. She turned her head to see Orlando pointing across the bar room.

“Let’s go home with those boys tonight,” Orlando said.

Mina looked at her blearily. Her lover was still a woman, had been so for about as long as Mina had become newly conscious and miserable, but her dress choice had become … interesting in recent months. Orlando had given herself a haircut that was buzzed short on all sides but stylized on the top, and she favored flowered dress shirts and skinny jeans or khaki pants that gave her an androgynous look. The change had been dramatic enough that Mina had been bracing for Orlando to fully become male soon, although neither of them had talked about it. She squinted at the crowd, saw the vague figures of two very young men sitting at a table.

“I’m not in the mood,” Mina rubbed her temples. “You can go home with them on your own if you please.”

Orlando sighed and put her hand on Mina’s shoulder. “Mina, we go out to these bars to have fun and every time we do you sit here looking sad and don’t drink …”

Mina shuddered. “After the last few decades and what happened to Allan I really can’t handle any … substances.”

“And I understand that, Mina, I do,” Orlando adjusted the purple and gold pashmina scarf around Mina’s neck. “But … dearest, when you leave me to my conquests I spend the whole time in a stranger’s bed worrying about you. If you don’t like either of them, would you at least be my wingwoman?”

“Wingwoman?”

Orlando laughed. “Oh, it’s … it’s slang you missed while you were gone. It means that when I’ll go after the one I like you’ll talk to his friend and keep him preoccupied.”

Mina suddenly remembered being young again, of entertaining men like Dr. Seward and Quincey Morris in drawing rooms, of playing the piano or singing while her dear Lucy flirted sweetly with Arthur Holmwood. Had she liked that, then? She thought she had, although she remembered her love for Lucy more than any sort of amity she felt toward those men. Sometimes it was even difficult to remember what their faces looked like.

“Please?” Orlando held out her arm for Mina to hook onto, even though both of them knew men and women rarely did that anymore. Mina took it anyway, although they had to break their arms apart as they snaked their way through the crowded tables.

“I’m just saying that I don’t understand why Agatha has to be black in the _Simon Snow_ musical,” Mina caught a young white man with reddish hair and a barely-there mustache monologuing to a bored, Aryan-looking woman who seemed too young for the bar. “It’s not that I would think that a black woman couldn’t be the most beautiful woman in the world, I just don’t think a guy like Simon Snow would find a black woman the most beautiful woman in the world.”

“So you’re not racist, you’re just calling Simon Snow racist?” the young woman asked -- although her eyes were locked on Mina’s, were almost glaring at her in suspicion -- as she passed.

“Yeah, exactly!” the young man said. “Man, I’m so glad we’re on the same page here.”

“Just curious, Kurt, but have you actually read any of those books?”

Mina felt herself being pulled by the hand to a different table where the two boys -- well, Mina supposed they were men but they looked annoyingly young to her -- sat across from each other with their hands wrapped around Duff beers. The older one -- the one who looked like he was in his early 30s -- was a white man with hair that resembled the top of soft serve ice cream. He gave them both a lopsided grin. The one in his early 20s, a pale man with black hair and eyes that looked vaguely Celestial -- wait, no, that word wasn’t acceptable anymore, she meant “Asian” -- seemed more surprised that they had come by.

“Want some company?” Orlando asked them.

“Um, sure,” the younger one said.

“Great men of science like us always have time for cool, gorgeous ladies like you.” The older one winked and shot finger-guns at the both of them.

Orlando laughed in a way that Mina found vaguely disconcerting as she sat down next to the older man. “My name’s Vita and my friend here is Ellen. How about you?”

“Oh, I’m --” the older man coughed, and when he spoke again his voice was deeper. “Tonight, you can call us Dr. James and Professor Rob.”

The younger one waved him off. “Just ‘Rob’ is fine -- I started using that nickname after I learned there was already a famous scientist with my full name. But unlike James here, I like to punch out of work once in awhile.”

“Oh, come on!” James clapped a hand on Rob’s shoulder and shook it. “My buddy here grew up in a fully-automated retrofuturism home with a flying time-travel car. He lives and breathes science. My parents barely tolerated my robot dog!”

Orlando laughed sweetly and pet James’ cheek, making him blush. “Oh, that’s so interesting. Perhaps you could help Ellen with her smartphone. We’re such dunces at new technology, aren’t we, dear?”

“I …” Mina coughed into her hand, found her eyes staring at the grooves in the wooden table. “I often don’t see the point of keeping up with these things. They do change so quickly.”

Rob nodded and pointed a finger at her. “See, what you said right there -- that’s the problem with modern consumers. People see technology as a burden or a threat. It’s a hassle. It’s something that’ll destroy their livelihoods. But when my father became an inventor he did it to make things that were cool, things that amazed people. I want people to feel that wonder when it comes to technology.”

“Hey, there’s no shame in making things that are practical and cool.” James turned back to Orlando. He spoke into her ear, but was loud enough that the whole table could hear it. “But there’s a lot of real cool, amazing things that’ll imbue you with a sense of wonder that Rob and I could show you back at our place, baby.”

This boy is a self-satisfied bore, Mina thought, but Orlando insisted on buying both men their next round of drinks.

After two hours of dreary flirting and answering boring questions (“What brings you here?” “Why don’t you want to drink?” “What part of England are you from, anyway?”) with half-true answers, the four of them left the bar. James and Rob led them to a paid parking lot a few blocks away, and Mina was only somewhat surprised to see that they had come in a red Acme flying car. Orlando and James sat in the front seats while Mina scrunched up with Rob in the back.

“Like my ride?” James called to them as it lifted off. “It’s vintage! From the 1950s -- older than all of us. Can you imagine if you had to live your life without one of these babies?”

“It must be terrible,” Mina grumbled.

Orlando laughed uncomfortably. “Well, personally, I adore this style of cars. It’s funny, isn’t it? All you Americans talk a big game about how much you hate aliens, and yet you based so much of your early technology on their flying saucers.”

James suddenly jerked the vehicle. Mina shrieked and reached for whatever she could, saw Orlando bracing herself against her chair as well.

“What happened? Is something wrong?” Mina asked.

James looked back at her in the rearview mirror, and Mina could see him glare at her.

“We’ve … we’ve accomplished a lot without aliens, okay?”

Mina didn’t say anything as James continued to drive. As he did, Rob leaned over and whispered into her ear.

“All of the adults in James’ town were captured by aliens when he was young,” he said. “It’s not that he’s a speciesist. He said he used to have alien friends and once even kissed an alien but … it’s a bit of a sore point.”

“I see,” Mina whispered back. She wondered what James would say if he knew she was there for the very first alien invasion of Earth, wondered if he would care that she still regretted what they had to do to stop it. 

The car began its descent. Mina looked outside the bubbled body of the car and saw a huge parking lot surrounding a modernist office building. It was a white block three floors high, lined with one-way glass windows and topped with a large sign reading, “D&D Labs.”

“Are we stopping here?” Mina asked. “I thought we were going back to your place.”

“Well, um,” Rob shrugged. “Actually, this is our place. D&D Labs provides on-site housing to all of its employees.”

“You never know when genius is going to strike!” James said, waving his finger in the air. Mina supposed it was good for Orlando that his mood had improved.

“Seems very … early 20th century American, doesn’t it?” Orlando asked. “Company towns and all.”

Rob shrugged. “Well, we could always get our own apartments but …”

“... but does an apartment have a ball-pit and a Good Burger vending machine?” James moved his hand into the backseat so he and Rob could fist-bump.

“Hell, no!” Rob answered.

They landed in an oversized space in the parking lot. As Rob extended a hand to help Mina out of the car, her eyes glanced up at the sign. A large bird landed on the second “D.”

“What’s that?” Mina asked, pointing to it.

Orlando cupped her hands over her brow as she looked up at it. “I’m not sure -- it looks kind of like an osprey, but it’s hard to see in the dark.”

“Would you like a picture of it?” Rob asked Mina. “I’ve actually been beta-testing some add-on hardware to let regular smartphones to take clear pictures at night.”

“What’s the point of that if the original companies will put out better cameras in their next line?”

The bird suddenly flapped its wings and took off. “Oh … pity. We’re a bit too late for that,” Mina said. She actually surprised herself by how disappointed she was -- she supposed she was grateful for the focus on something besides this queer one-night stand they were all embarking upon.

“Let’s go inside,” James said. He led them to the front sliding glass doors, opened them with the wave of his electronic watch. Mina’s eyes widened. White the exterior of the building had been nondescript, the entrance was like technological wonderland: all blue metal surfaces with circuitry running along every inch, overseen by imposing video screens and flanked by coils and control panels.

“My God …” Mina whispered as Rob took her hand.

“Oh, that’s right. You should keep your voice down -- you wouldn’t want to wake --”

The televisions had been dark, but suddenly buzzed to life. When they turned on, a bubbly, tall, blonde white woman in her thirties wearing a pink dress suit waved at them from the view screens. “HI DR. JAMES! HI PROFESSOR ROB! Ooooooh! Looks like you brought some ladies home from the baaaaaar. Are they your new _girlfriends_ , huh?”

James huffed and rolled his eyes. Rob just waved back at her. “Don’t worry. We’ll keep it quiet and be ready for the scrum stand-up in the morning, Deidre.”

“Glad to hear it!” Deidre clapped her hands together. “Nighty-night, beloved employees. Don’t forget to use protection on company property -- birth control and paternity leave is paid out of pocket!”

Mina felt her mouth drop open as the view screens went black. My God, she and Allan left England in the late 1940s due to that kind of treatment. Had this been what these men had chosen?

“She’s a character, huh?” Rob took Mina’s hand again and he and James led the women down a hallway. It was smaller in scale than the lobby and led off to various offices or open areas with control panels or laboratory areas with chemistry sets, but the aesthetics remained the same. Mina’s eyes kept darting to the view screens as they walked about.

“Character, indeed!” Orlando exclaimed. “Where did you dig her up from?”

“She’s the boss.”

“The boss’ _sister_ ,” James corrected, he led them through a door at the corner of the turn in the hallway, down a stairwell where the futuristic aesthetics fell away to be replaced by a generic beige paint, rubber and metal that knew it wasn’t impressing anybody. “Our boss is a lot of things, but he’s not an idiot.”

“Deidre’s not dumb, she’s just … weird,” Rob said with a shrug.

James scoffed and rolled his eyes. “Too bad we can’t find any women with actual skills for this place.”

“I liked that one lady who interviewed with us. Ugh, what was her name? Something about monarchy and the woods? She wore skulls in her hair?”

“Nah, I’m with the boss on that one. ‘For zee last time,’” James said, his voice taking on an odd approximation of a German accent. “‘Making mooovies into liquid eez not science! You are stuuuupid!’”

Rob and James laughed at their joke. Mina shot Orlando a dirty look. Orlando gave an exaggerated shrug, mouthed words to Mina that seemed like “We’ll leave after.” Although Orlando tended to like to spend hours sensually cuddling or sleeping after sex, so Mina didn’t put much stock into any promises she made right now.

“At least we have our --” Rob opened the door at the bottom of the staircase and sighed. The room he was leading them into looked like a college dorm, complete with bunk beds, a pizza-stained pull-out couch, posters for _Death Blow_ and _Action Doctor_ on the wall, four video game systems, and a white, redheaded teenage girl splayed out on a beanbag chair in the center of it all, her fingers furiously texting on a purple phone.

“-- our summer intern.”

The girl lifted her head off the beanbag chair and squinted at Mina and Orlando. “Who the hell are you guys?”

“Pardon me, gentle intern,” James said with an exaggerated bow. “Might we partake of our mutual living space in order to give these very, very fine ladies a most enchanted evening --”

“Okay, you want the room to fuck. I get it,” The intern groaned, placed her hands on her lower back and stretched as she got to her feet. “Also, have either of you fixed the wi-fi on the coffee-maker yet or do I have to get Moonbucks for the scrum tomorrow morning?”

James coughed and waggled his finger at the intern as he spoke again. “Well, I think a very go-getter attitude in a summer intern would be for her to figure out how to fix the wi-fi.”

“Yeah, totally,” the intern said, her eyes locked on her phone. “Or, like, we could also just get one of the millions of coffee-makers that don’t require you to be on the internet.”

“In our bright future, beans need intellectual copyright protection, too!”

The intern sighed. “Double pump of caramel for you it is then,” she said as she pushed past Mina and walked out the door.

“I like hazelnut!” James called after her, but the door had already slammed closed. He shook his head. “Do you see what we’re working with, here? What the hell is that?”

Rob shrugged. “The boss said he knows her grandpa.”

James made an ugly, dismissive noise, but when he turned back to Orlando his mouth was an inhumanly wide smile. “So, what kind of music do you like, babe?”

After some negotiating over choices -- apparently Rob’s hatred of some band called Du Jour was a particular thorn in James’ side -- Rob set up his smartphone to play his own mix of songs. Orlando offered to take the top bunk bed with James -- a move that Mina knew was a concession to her, while Mina and Rob set up the pull-out couch for themselves. Rob smiled to himself as he turned off the lights and pressed a tiny box. The box sprouted wings and flew to the center of the ceiling, spun colored lights over every surface. A punk song with slow, steady keyboard and a mournful lead singer whose gender Mina couldn’t determine played from the speakers.

“ _When the earth was still black,_  
_And Old Gods remained dreaming,_  
_In dimensions unreached and unsought_  
_Life was teeming …_ ”

Mina settled down on the bed, the hard poles digging into the middle of her back, and let Rob wrap his arms around her waist and kiss her cheeks. This all felt … strange to Mina, like deja vu for an adolescence that she never experienced. When she kissed him back, she could feel the young man’s excited energy, but found there was nothing in her to match it.

“Everything OK?” Rob asked her when they broke their kiss.

No, Mina wanted to say. Everything wasn’t OK. She didn’t like being reminded of how old, how left behind she felt. She hated to remember how she’d once struggled to keep up with a rapidly changing world and lost everything because of it. She was 143 years old, and every human being besides Orlando was now an immature child to whom she couldn’t relate. She knew this for a fact, and yet it still hurt unfathomably. Despite this, she shook her head, helped Rob take off her pants. When he put his head between her legs, she tried to enjoy the sensations for which she knew she could feel no matching emotion.

“ _Last time I saw you_  
_We had just ripped apart,_  
_I called you my hero_  
_But you still broke my heart …_ ”

Mina stopped trying to listen to the music. She kept her hand clamped down on her scarf as she watched the lights circle the ceiling.

~*~*~

D&D Labs’ summer intern sat alone in the company’s cafeteria. She scrolled up and down her phone with her left hand, dipped some Good Nuggets from the vending machine into their special sauce with her right.

“You know,” the intern mumbled with a full mouth to the empty room. “ … I don’t see the hype.”

The cafeteria’s television suddenly came to life. The intern gasped as Deidre’s unfathomably cheerful face lit up the screen. “Good evening, summer intern! What are the rules about television in the cafeteria?”

“Oh come on, Deidre, it’s off-hours!” the intern complained to the television screen. “If I didn’t have to commute back to Washington --”

“Every time is a good time to be informed, intern! Consume your current events! Learn, learn, learn!”

“Crazy bitch,” the intern murmured under her breath as the television flickered to footage of President Tannen meeting with the Queen of Old New Tokyo. The intern watched as the President -- still clad in the ugly suits and tacky gold jewelry that he’d worn in his pre-political life -- clearly ogle the blonde, shapely queen in her regal white dress.

“I just want to say one thing --” the President told a San Diego Channel Four News Reporter on location outside of her diamond palace. “The Queen is still hot, but she’s not hot like when she wore that short skirt when she was 14 and fought all those aliens. I mean, like, she knows the importance of not letting some buttheads from other planets push us around, right? But, kind of who cares if you’re not still wearing an outfit like that, am I right?”

“Ugh,” the intern dug her fingers into the hair tightened into a ponytail around her head. “Change channel!”

The TV flickered to show live footage Senator Pelekai of Hawaii yelling on the Senate Floor.

“Perhaps for the good Senator of Ohio, the personal impact of the Presidents’ anti-alien laws are just a hypothetical, but ever since my sister found the being who began as our pet and would become a member of our family, I have seen the benefit of human-alien relationships firsthand. First. Hand. Do you understand the kind of bonds that can form between human and alien, Senator Keaton? Do you think that could sway your bigoted mindset?”

“Change channel!”

An older man with greying blond hair sat with his hands folded over a newsdesk as he scolded the viewers. “And all of you Millennials and liberals whining about unfair it is that Tannen’s in office? Where were you on November 8, 2016? How did you let an idiot like Tannen win? Oh! I know! You let a flawed candidate like Nope be the nominee. And before you go on Cheeper and whine about ‘fake news’ and ‘sexism’ and other liberal horseshit to spackle over the fact that you couldn’t beat the least -- the least qualified man in history, answer why it took Nope so long to answer questions about why her husband once bankrupted a town when he was 18.”

“Change the fucking channel!” the intern screamed at the television.

The screen flickered to show what -- by the swaying of the camera -- looked like a TubeTube video. A young, white boy with black curly hair wearing a shirt with a large star held the camera as he walked through his house.

“So, people on the news have been wanting to hear stories about what’s good about aliens. Well, for me that’s … me. I’m part-alien. And I want you to meet my family and tell my stories.”

The intern put her hands over her heart and cooed, “Aww” as the young boy was suddenly surrounded by three women of varying shapes and hues who waved pleasantly at the camera. The newscaster’s voice suddenly broke in.

“This charming video by a young boy from the Delmarva peninsula was re-cheepered by a controversial follower of the white supremacist movement Neo-Hynkelism. The video is currently the most disliked on TubeTube and most of the comments are variations on Adenoyd Hynkel’s infamous double-X symbol as well as several racial and ethnic slurs.”

“Oh, fuck you!” The intern threw the remainder of her nuggets at the television, pouted with her arms crossed for a few solid minutes.

“I guess I’d be who has to clean this,” she grumbled to herself as she got up and pulled out the cafeteria’s broom. “How has it only been half a year since that asshole -- Shit!”

A large white rat scampered over the remnants of the nuggets. The intern lifted the broom over her head, prepared to bring it down on the rat’s head. “Fucking lab escapee … get back here!”

The rat zoomed out of the cafeteria and took off down the hall. The intern ran after it, still brandishing the broom.

“If you start turning into some sort of glowing mutant monster-rat, I swear to God …”

<Don't worry, I won't.>

The voice in her head startled the intern enough that she stopped running for a split second, long enough for the rat to turn a corner and scamper under the floor into one of the offices.

The intern opened the door to the office and turned on the light. She saw no sign of the rat, started to look under the desk and between the computer wires. “Where are you?” she whispered as she moved to open the office’s closet. “And are you really telepathic, or have I just been sleeping so little that --”

The intern opened the door. A red light flashed in her eyes.

~*~*~

“Orlando …” Mina had to stand on her tip-toes to whisper into her lover’s ear. “Orlando, I want to leave.”

Her plea was answered with a long sigh. Orlando laid on her side, her butt almost off the edge of the bed while James was curled up on the side closer to the wall. Mina shook her head. Rob had fallen asleep twenty minutes ago, and Mina was tired of waiting.

“If you really want to stay, I’ll ...”

“No, no …” Orlando reached down and yanked on her underwear. To Mina’s surprise Orlando almost seemed shy about showing herself, was turned away from Mina as she pulled her shirt over her shoulders. “I … I don’t think tonight went as well as I’d hoped. We can slip out.”

“Is something wrong?” Mina asked.

“We …” Orlando paused mid-way through pulling on her pants, shook her head. “We’ll talk about it later, dear. Let’s just head out from this overgrown boarding school, shall we?”

Mina began to answer, but suddenly felt a cold, needle-like pressure on the center of her back.

“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that,” an unfamiliar voice said. “Raise your hands above your head and turn around, slowly. And if you scream for help, I’ll shoot.”

Mina and Orlando obeyed. When they turned, they found themselves staring at a black woman in her 30s wearing a black and white bodysuit. The white fur on her face started to blend into her skin and her small, dark eyes became more humanoid as she pointed two miniature guns at their heads.

“Don’t be fooled. I don’t want to fire these these crickets any more than you do, but they could set this whole floor ablaze with one shot,” the woman said. “I’m Agent C of the HIB. I need you both to come with me.”

End Part One.


	2. Chapter 2

It surprised Mina how their captor seemed so apologetic. Agent C had the needle-guns pointed at them, but after she led them out of the dorm and into the stairwell she said things like “Open that window and climb out onto the lawn, please,” and “Sorry, it’s a bit of a walk before I can call the car,” as she frog-marched them across the green to the far end of the parking lot.

The slick, black Crown Victoria drove up to them so fast it ruffled Mina’s hair and the edge of her scarf. Inside the car, the white, male driver wearing a black suit and sunglasses collapsed and folded up into the steering wheel.

“What on earth?” Mina exclaimed, but Agent C was unperturbed.

“Mina Murray. Orlando. I need you both to get in the back,” Agent C said.

Mina’s eyes widened. She had kept her hands folded together behind her head through this process, but she wasn’t afraid to glare at Agent C now. “I’d like to know how you know who we are and where you’re taking us, first.” 

“We know a lot of things. And I’m not taking you to a secret hideout to shoot you, if that’s what you’re worried about. Actually …” Agent C whirled the guns around in her hands so the butts were facing toward Mina and Orlando, then moved them both to one hand and reached beneath the neck of her bodysuit to reveal a tight silver necklace with a button in the center. When she pressed it, the guns disappeared. “Let’s put those back in the pocket universe. I mostly used them because I didn’t want you guys to start asking questions that would waste our time and reveal my cover. There’s no reason we can’t get along.”

Agent C smiled at the end of the speech, but Mina noticed that as she did her eyes suddenly flashed yellow -- the eyes of a wolf.

Mina looked to Orlando, hoping for a clue of what to do, but Orlando was already looking at Mina, seemed to be deferring to her.

“Fine,” Mina said, rolling back her shoulders and trying to look more confident than she really felt, “but I want some explanations as soon as we’re in the car.”

Agent C shrugged. “I think this is more of a ‘show, don’t tell’ situation, but I’ll do what I can. It’s my boss you really have to speak to, though.”

Mina didn’t like the sound of that, but she and Orlando got in the car. As soon as their seatbelts were buckled, she felt Orlando reach for her hand.

Outside of the car Agent C tapped again on her pocket universe necklace. A black ladies’ pantsuit with a white dress shirt and black flats appeared on her body. She got into the driver’s seat. “Buckle your seatbelts and keep your necks against the seat backs,” Agent C warned, then she turned on the engine.

Mina had kept her neck an inch from where it should have been and thus shrieked when she felt it suddenly snap backwards. The car was going so fast she could barely process the trees and buildings zooming by outside the windows. She felt Orlando’s nails digging into her fingers.

“So, where exactly are we going that we need to be going this fast?” Orlando asked.

“The San Francisco office of the HIB,” Agent C called to the backseat. “You may have heard of us by another name, but we’ve gotten more egalitarian lately … even if we got some pushback for the name as too human-centric. But I guess that’s all water under the bridge now.”

“I …” Mina gasped for air. “I don’t believe we’ve heard of you. Are you a private contractor? Some arm of the American government?”

“It’s … it’s complicated.’”

Mina tried to ask a follow-up question but she felt the car kick up another couple of dozen kilometers per hour. She gripped onto the leather seats and strained for the rest of the ride.

~*~*~

The car stopped with a vomit-inducing jerk in front of a metal-and-glass box of a building. Agent C actually got out and opened the door for them, smiled with a self-satisfaction as Mina and Orlando stumbled out onto the pavement. From there, Agent C led them through the rotating door at the front of the building. Mina gasped when they got inside.

The main foyer of the HIB headquarters was enormous -- several stories high and overseen by a large screen about five stories tall showing a map of the world and close-ups of dozens of human faces. Two octopus-like beings, each with a single eye on a stalk and extra fingers at the end of their tentacles, manned the control panel. Yet they were a mere detail in the tableau before her.

A huge line of aliens snaked throughout the foyer. While some of these beings looked indistinguishable from humans and others had a few telltale signs of difference -- a man with pointed ears here, a woman with rainbow hair there -- there were several more that looked humanoid but could never pass for human: broad-shouldered men with thick black hair and ridged foreheads, people whose bald heads were spotted and sported ridges along their red eyes, gorgeous women with blue skin and tentacles for hair. Then there were several who did not look human at all. Green and blue gelatinous blobs, tall mantis-people and flying jellyfish made of energy also held their places in line.

“It’s a bit more diverse than it was in the 19th century, huh?” Agent C asked, a smile on her face and her arms crossed.

Mina blinked a few times before looking back at Agent C. “What is this place?”

“Customs,” Agent C said. “We usually aren’t this crowded, but ever since Tannen wrote that cheep threatening an executive order to stop all alien immigration we’ve had several people either trying to find a way off or on our planet before the force field goes up.”

“Why would they want to come here considering Tannen’s policies?” Orlando asked, her eyes locked on a giant, translucent and spotted caterpillar-like creature of about human size.

“Imploded home planets. Solar systems swallowed up by black holes. Inter-stellar wars. Full invasion and colonization of their home planet. Families and diaspora communities on Earth. But we’re wasting time. Please follow me.”

Agent C cut with confidence through the lines, leaving Mina and Orlando to awkwardly push their way past gruesome tentacled beasts and humanoids with rubbery heads. Occasionally, Agent C would nod at one of them or wave back as another shook an appendage. At one point, she stopped short in front of an Asian-looking man with horns and an Indian-looking woman with green hair and tiny wings, but when she saw the child near their feet she breathed a sigh of relief and said “Oh, good for you.” Then, later in the line, a furry, blue centaur-like creature with a long tail whose end resembled a scalpel stopped her short.

<You’re her, aren’t you?> the alien asked, its question reverberating in all three of their heads. <The last of Earth’s five warriors. Please, a moment of your time! You were such an inspiration!>

“That was a long time ago, ma’am,” Agent C said brusquely, not slackening her place.

At the end of the line -- or rather the beginning -- Mina saw what looked like a perfectly normal human family of an older man, an attractive young blonde woman, and two younger men -- one of whom had his eyes perpetually closed, arguing with the customs agent.

“Oh please, please, you can’t let us stay on here!” the older man begged. “We were just meeting an old friend -- it was one of those reunions that everyone talks about but that never gets off the ground. Please, please, don’t leave us on Earth with that madman.”

“Ugh, will you quit being a drama-queen and stop holding up the line?” heckled a short gray alien with a smooth, hairless body. He sipped on the martini glass he was holding. “Fucking tourists …”

The older man whirled around to confront the gray alien. “Excuse me! We lived on Earth for five years!”

“Try 72 years, and I didn’t have to hide my true form, you has-beens!”

“You couldn’t handle our true form!”

“Break this up and confiscate his alcohol, please,” Agent C said to the customs agent as they passed.

When they had gotten free of the line, Agent C led them into an elevator. She was silent during its short ascent, merely nodded her head as the doors opened into a large, white office. A black man with a thin mustache and closed-cropped hair, wearing a black three-piece suit and sunglasses, sat behind the modern, glass-and-metal desk. Upon seeing this man, Mina felt an immediate warmth and friendliness coming from him, albeit not enough to let her fully put her guard down.

“Ms. Mina Murray? Mr. or Ms. Orlando?” The man gestured his hand to the uncomfortable-looking egg-like chairs in front of the office. “Have a seat. Y’all enjoy the trip?”

“I should say not!” Mina said as she sat down stiffly, Orlando doing so a moment after. “My partner and I have been exceedingly patient but I think at this point we’re owed some explanations.”

“Yeah, being a secret organization we ain’t too big on the spillin’-our-guts thing. Anyway,” the man laid his sunglasses on the table and pressed his palm against his chest, “y’all can call me Jay. That over there is Agent C -- nicest agent you’ll ever meet -- she’s a real sweetheart. And for the last five years, I’ve been running the HIB. We’ve been dedicated to managing all extraterrestrial activity behind the scenes since the 1960s.”

Orlando shook her head. “Wait, wait … we’ve had alien attacks in all countries since the first Martian Invasion. What’s the point of a secret society to deal with them?”

“Most of them ain’t comin’ here to invade,” Jay said. “You think after we beat off Martians and carnivorous plants and giant seed pods every other year in the 1950s we were going to roll out the red carpet for every creepy-looking motherfucker with a spaceship? Hell, even if we did, we couldn’t guarantee that their definition of diplomacy wouldn’t involve eating us -- I mean, that actually happened once. Honestly, I didn’t want to believe it when they recruited me for this place, but sometimes the public is better off not knowing half the shit we deal with. Sometimes it’s nice to just go about your lives when you don’t have a say in whether or not the world is going to end.”

Mina frowned. “If I may, I submit that’s the mentality that led to us poisoning thousands in the first Martian War.”

“And every subsequent Martian invasion after that. I totally remember -- even the U.S. government was rolling out the latest strain of Dr. Moreau’s old anthrax and calling it flu season,” Jay leaned forward on his desk, his elbows out wide and his hands clasped together. “One of the things we’ve always been proud of is not having to resort to that … at least most of the time. It got us in trouble now and then -- we had a pair of FBI agents breathing down our necks half the time, and sometimes they beat us to the latest small-scale alien shit -- but usually we had it covered. There’s a lot we’ve worked out quietly and a lot more aliens we’ve helped live safe and happy lives in America. And we want to keep doing that even with President White Power in charge.”

Mina raised an eyebrow. “I don’t disagree that Tannen’s a racist, but I wouldn’t think that would have any bearing on his treatment of actual extraterrestrials, some of whom are actually dangerous.”

Agent C stifled a sudden burst of laughter from the back of where Mina and Orlando were sitting. Jay shook his head and chuckled as well.

“Y’all serious now? Who do you think gets shit on when all the white folks decide they’re justified in kicking the asses of someone who looks different? Who do you think comes next after the government decides to purge all the space-bugs? Whose lives get ruined in their quest to try? Do you think a government that doesn’t care about the differences between two different sets of people with pointy ears from the other side of the galaxy gives two shits about the differences between all the Muslim countries in the Middle East? What do you think this is all really about at the end of the day?”

Mina bristled. “Surely you’re missing the intricacies of these situations …”

“Yeah? Let me ask you something, Ms. Murray. Who do you think was most likely to have stayed behind when y’all hit ‘em with the H-142? The rich folks living in Kensington or the Jews and Chinese living in Whitechapel and Limehouse?”

Mina sighed. Perhaps there was a reason Captain Nemo immediately knew he could never reconcile what they had done.

“Well, you’ve made your points,” Mina crossed her arms across her chest. “Now will you tell us what you want?”

“Your little hookup tonight … how’d y’all feel about keeping that going for a bit?”

Mina’s eyes nearly popped from her skull. She glanced over at Orlando, saw her lover was equally shocked.

“Doc James and Prof Rob aren’t just some Silicon Valley fuckboys. There are a couple of scientists vying for the chance to get that force-shield up and running, and we’re pretty sure that their boss Doctor Dex is the guy coming the closest to pulling it off. You’ve already got an in, we’re asking you if you want to stay close to those guys and help us monitor the progress, get us ready to sabotage it if we need to.”

“Why us?” Orlando asked.

“Convenience, for one. Our shapeshifter Agent C here was monitoring James and Rob when you two swooped in. Secret societies tend to keep watch on each other -- she knew you from our files and I told her to keep an eye on you.”

“Monitoring James and Rob?” Mina murmured. The appearance of the osprey was obvious in retrospect … perhaps she had changed to some other animal in the bar, perhaps a fly or -- Mina’s eyes suddenly widened and her upper body craned around the egg chair in turning back to look at Agent C. “Were you that blonde, white teenager?”

Jay cast a surprised look toward Agent C. Mina thought she saw the woman’s dark cheeks flush red.

“It’s, uh, the face of an old friend,” Agent C said, her voice laden with regret. “I can’t do long-term surveillance missions because my superpowers have a two-hour time limit, but sometimes it’s easier to pretend to be some teenager sneaking into a bar than a fly that might get squished or a rat that might get chased. Sometimes. Not always.”

Jay chuckled and shook his head. “I don’t know, sounds like some messed up TubeTube experiment to me.”

Agent C frowned and looked ready to say something, but Orlando interrupted.

“I’m sorry, I still don’t understand this plan. You seem to have a sophisticated surveillance system and advanced extraterrestrial technology. Can’t you just use some drones and hackers to get the information you need?”

“Yeah, there are a few things wrong with that.” Jay picked up a remote on his desk and aimed it at the side of the right-hand wall. A television screen descended from the ceiling along the wall. “See, we actually do keep tabs on the President but … ehhh, it ain’t really going too well.”

He pressed another button and the screen lit up, showing a high-angle recording of President Tannen sitting at the Oval Office desk. Three men -- the first wearing a cowboy hat and bolo tie, the second blocky glasses with thick colorful frames, and a third wearing a pinstripe suit -- stood behind him, acting as official security and de facto intimidation. On one of the couches sat a perturbed-looking Gudman, on the other sat a blond white man with a bad haircut, salt-and-pepper beard and a rumpled shirt beneath a blazer who Mina recognized as the President’s chief strategist. From the opposite side of the room, a labcoat-wearing man with a strange, triangular face topped with a patch of brown hair pontificated in front of a force field diagram.

“You see, it’s not that the technology for the force field _doesn’t_ exist,” the man said -- his unplaceable Germanic accent only slightly more distracting than his quick, nervous manner of speaking. “Even the energy to pull this thing off … well … it kind of exists. It’s really doesn’t actually exist if you take cost and practicality into question, buuuuut I have no moral code to speak of and you seem rich …”

“I _am_ rich,” Tannen bellowed.

“Right, right. Of course, Mr. President. You are very, very rich. You are totally going to pay me all of the money you owe me or at least enough that I can stash away to pay for my daughter’s doctorate before the higher education system implodes. Anyway, money and energy is no problem, the problem is for the field to be useable it can’t be static. You need to have checkpoints at which people would work the field, take it down in part for imports and exports. I personally fought a sentient platypus for years so I don’t think anyone in this room cares about endangered species, but we need at least a cover for the environmentalist groups, pretend we care about the migration of birds and that sort of thing. Oh! And we also need to determine how the field will work along the coastline, how we’re going to deal with how the shield will affect the weather and cruise ship routes and those idiots who go longboarding in the winter and get stuck and … Mr. President, are you on your _phone_?”

Tannen looked up from the game he was playing. “Oh yeah. Whatever. Cool. Just, like, give us your response to our RFP and we’ll go with the cheap one.”

The scientist laughed nervously. “You see, the problem is your RFP was pretty unspecific. It … it was like one page that was ‘Keep out all aliens’ and a picture of a dome. And cheapness is relative because I could make the shield for cheap but it may be more expensive if it’s powered by cold fusion instead of nuclear power, but then if we go with nuclear we have to take the disposal into consideration. It’s a big thing. Do you think I could just, like, talk to some career civil servant in the Department of Energy and maybe hash out something more specific, please?”

Gudman let out a derisive snort. Tannen glared at him briefly before he stood up and slammed on his desk. The scientist sunk further into his already-slouching posture as Tannen stalked toward him and thrust his face about an inch from the scientist.

“Now, listen here, nerdfesser.” Tannen said, his voice losing the cheerful, sleazy affect it always took on when he was talking to supporters, becoming the dark, bullying sneer that the world had learned from the videotapes and hot mic footage that circled briefly through the news cycle before getting dismissed days after in the wake of the latest scandal. “If I wanted to hear about your dork shit I wouldn’t have become the President.”

The scientist looked scared, but not scared enough that he didn’t look confused in that moment. “Wait, but … you got elected on this issue. If you didn’t want people to figure out how to do it ...”

“I’m saying, dipshit, that if you’re not smart enough to figure it out then you can make like an ameoba and get the fuck out of my office.”

“‘Make like an ameoba …’” the scientist thought for a minute, then shook his head. “I can figure it out! I just need to talk to someone who actually knows what they’re doing!”

Tannen’s face turned beet red. “What the fuck did you just say to me?”

The scientist started babbling out apologies as the three goons surrounded him. As they pulled him from the Oval Office, Tannen turned and pointed to Gudman. “And what the fuck were you snorting about before, butthead?” he screamed as the otherwise catatonic chief strategist smiled privately to himself from the other couch.

The screen went black as Jay turned off the television. “That’s how all of this shit tends to go with him.”

Orlando shook her head. “God, he … he really is exhausting to listen to for even minutes at a time.”

“Tell me about it,” Agent C chimed in.

Jay leaned back on his chair. “And as for hackers. Look … you can get lucky with that type of thing -- I had a cousin who was part of the scheme that ended the July 4th invasion, and a lot of people still wonder how the hell the United States pulled it off that easily because by all accounts a species with advanced space travel should have had decent virus protection. But hackers tend to be more loyal to their own shit than the mission. People join the HIB because they get to do stuff here they can’t do anywhere else, free from government interference or some rich old white dude’s grudges. We don’t get money. We don’t see our families if we still have any. Old teammates …”

Jay pursed his lips. He seemed to find it hard to continue. “Well, their retirement package is basically a mind-wipe. We live like monks here -- at least officially. You don’t choose that life if you’re the type of person who delights in breaking people’s shit for fun and profit. We tried it with some Egyptian guy and ended up having to mind-wipe him after he sold us out and spent months re-building our own infrastructure. Plus, these guys we’re spying on are at the cutting edge of technology. Just having some alien tech they haven’t seen before now and then isn’t really enough.”

“Well … all right,” Mina said, stiffening her back and looking as directly into Jay’s eyes as possible. “But you’ve only answered the question of ‘why us?’ and not ‘why should we?’ I’d like to think you’re trustworthy -- you’re certainly the most genial head of any secret society that I’ve met -- but we’re not your countrymen and we don’t know your endgame.”

Jay shrugged. “‘Upholding peace among all worlds’ ain’t really enough for you?”

“That sounds like something everyone says they want when they’re truly after something else.”

“Fair enough.” Jay stood up and walked to the front of his desk, leaning back on it as he talked to the two of them. “Look, we’re not going to threaten you to be here. If you want to say no, you’re going to see a little red flashing light and then neither of you will remember this happened. But I think the less power the President has, the better it is for the world as well as the country. I know y’all got your own troubles back across the pond but I’m guessing you’re not too fond of how he’s hyping up Urkhardt and that Bastard guy or all those other racist politicians freaking out about the Q’mar refugees.”

Mina glanced over at Orlando. Once again, she quickly realized this was a decision that Orlando would leave up to her. Mina pointedly looked at her nails. “I imagine it’s a bit hard to find peace when you’re an undocumented immigrant. Orlando and I have been staying at a lot of apartments temporarily leased out on holiday. It’d be nice to have a home base here.”

Jay laughed. “You want me to hook you up with a house?”

“You have to set up your former mind-wiped agents somewhere, don’t you?” Mina asked. “What are you paying people with if not in money?

“Also, I have my own goals for this mission.”

It was Jay and Agent C’s turn to look at each other.

“And what are those?” Jay asked.

“I think we can do better than sabotaging a few scientists.” Mina stood up. She kept her back straight and her neck stiff as she craned up to look directly in Jay’s brown eyes. “I want to take Tannen out of office.”

Orlando gasped. “Mina!”

Jay slowly smiled, then laughed. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “Y’all serious?”

“Very.” Mina kept the tone of her voice even. She was sure Orlando was still shocked, but Mina told herself that Orlando had given her this decision for a reason. “You said he’s a danger to the world, possibly the galaxy. Don’t you think it’s worth it?”

“You got any ideas?”

Mina took a deep breath. “A few … I could think of some. If I’m sticking my neck out to undermine a head of state, I want it to count. There are a lot of mad scientists out there. Who’s to say if he can burn through them all in the next four years? Let’s get this done, let’s do this right.”

Orlando stood up to whisper in Mina’s ear. “Dearest, could we --?”

Jay stuck out his hand. Mina took it.

“Let’s make this count,” Jay said as they shook hands.

End Part Two.


	3. Chapter 3

On the drive away from HIB headquarters, Mina floated the idea of getting back into bed with James and Rob, but Orlando insisted they were both the type of man to be intrigued by the promise of more. Agent C had managed to get the boys’ cell phone numbers from an earlier monitoring session, and Orlando sent the both of them a text message reading, “hope u don’t mind us splitting early but we wouldn’t want 2 interrupt your sprung or whatever. Catch u both 2nite?” Afterward, Orlando and Mina let Agent C drop them off a few blocks away from where they were staying.

“We don’t have set cell numbers in the HIB, but I’ll contact you periodically with this,” Agent C promised as she handed what looked like a tiny hearing aid to Mina. Then Agent C gave them a salute and called out, “Take care of yourselves!” before speeding off, rustling their clothing and any trash and leaves scattered on the street as the car zoomed away.

It wasn’t a long walk to the place where Orlando and Mina were staying. They’d both rented a room in a gorgeous Victorian-style house, painted purple and black with gold trim, that sat on a corner in a residential neighborhood in the California mountains. They crept quietly up the stairs into the room they were staying -- a room with purple-and-black damask wallpaper and a four-poster bed with red curtains that would have been adorable if not for the disturbing paintings of naked witches dismembering men on the walls.

Mina remembered Orlando’s earlier frustration, but Orlando had been so cooperative with the cell phone messages that Mina was surprised when Orlando sprawled herself down on the bed they were sharing with a frustrated huff.

“Well, I should have thought you’d request my opinion before preparing a coup,” Orlando grumbled.

Mina sighed. She glanced at herself in the large mirror across from the bed before removing her tight-fitting boots and settling next to Orlando. “Would you rather I said ‘no’ entirely?” Mina punched the sides of the pillow in an attempt to fluff it up. “I don’t think meddling with the affairs of a foreign government becomes morally neutral if you’re only ostensibly messing about with the capitalist sector.”

“You know morality isn’t a concern here,” Orlando said as she rubbed the bridge of her nose. “President Tannen is a cruel and vicious scoundrel. That Jay fellow is right in that the world would be better off without him.”

“So what is it, then?” Mina finally laid her head back on the pillow. Her eyes roamed over Orlando’s body -- part of Mina was searching for any visible changes but a bigger part just wanted to roll over and kiss her. “You’re not afraid of this mission, are you?”

Orlando smiled -- it made Mina’s heart flutter. She hadn’t seen Orlando smile that way for a very long time, hadn’t seen the side of Orlando’s mouth curl up in that roguish bravado that told Mina that the hero of countless wars, the seducer of innumerable women and men, had seen it all before and would see it all again. “Hardly.”

Mina planned to press Orlando further, but the smile was suddenly gone.

“But I’ve seen what happens when even bad leaders get assassinated, and the results are … well, the best were merely chaotic.”

“We don’t necessarily need to kill him. In fact, I’d prefer not to make him a martyr to the Neo-Hynkelites.”

Orlando shook her head. “Mina, you have no actual idea how to do this.”

“Yet,” Mina insisted. “The more we learn from the contractors the closer we’ll get to a solution.”

Mina saw Orlando’s eyes glance toward the witch’s painting, shuddered herself at the sight of the woman holding the man’s bleeding heart above his open chest, a dagger in the woman’s hand and her breasts displayed beneath her red robe.

“Let me ask you a question, and I want you to answer it honestly,” Orlando said. “I know you’re genuinely concerned about the good and honest Americans. I know you care about those from other worlds who come here. But are you doing this because you believe it’s right, or because you believe it will free you from your guilt?”

Mina felt the blood drain out of her face, a sick knot form in her gut. Orlando usually tried so hard not to mention what had happened in Washington state last year, and that she would now throw it in Mina’s face like this, even obliquely …

Mina turned away from Orlando, crossed her arms and stared up at the red canopy above the four-poster bed. “No one can free me from my guilt.”

“So long as you understand that,” Orlando said. “We’ll always have more to carry the older we get.”

Mina could hear Orlando shifting on the other side of the bed, heard her curling up and immediately snoring. As Mina watched Orlando, she wondered why she still felt the instinct to curl up against Orlando, why she immediately wanted Orlando’s comfort right after Orlando made her feel so ill-at-ease. Mina closed her eyes, tried to wish away the image of the witch with the bloody knife.

~*~*~

_One week later …_

In the heartland of America, a young man once again found himself walking through the woods in search of darkness. He kept his steps light and careful as he stepped between thin trees and on overgrown hills, testing the ground with every step he took. Whenever he felt the ground began to give, he took a divining rod out of his backpack, used it to trace another path of the labyrinthine tunnels that ran beneath the small Indiana town. After that, he took out his journal. It was his second now, styled after the journals created by the wiser of his great-uncles: blue leather covers with silver metalworking, each numbered on a silver plaque on the cover in the shape of a pine tree. He added the latest branch of the tunnels to the map he drew inside the journal’s pages.

The young man had come to this town because of stories about its creepy and mysterious history -- history that had started in the early 1980s but had only come to light recently, history that told of slimy slugs that turned into flower-headed monsters, of boys being taken to a mirror realm within the town, of the teenage girl who never returned. And then there was the facility that had been the origin of so many of these things, a facility that he couldn’t quite access yet.

An alarm beeped on the watch linked to his smartphone. The young man sighed and pulled down his lumberjack hat tighter upon his head. He still had another hour of daylight but he wanted to be back at his sister’s car before the sun went down. He shivered at the memory of being sixteen, of having their extended cryptid-hunting vacation in a mist-enshrouded town in Maine end when he and his sister were pulled into a rust-and-blood nightmare realm. The minute they’d gotten back to reality and to the car his sister had driven them straight to the nearest Happy World Land.

But whatever terrors the Indiana night had in store for them, they still had plenty of time to run. After only twenty minutes of walking the young man caught the sight of his sister’s loud Toyota Yaris -- a cheap car that she’d bought used so she’d have the money to give it a custom pink paint job and slap hideous plastic eyelashes over the headlights. He opened up the passenger side door to see her, still somewhat shocked that she’d been wearing that light green sweater with silver safety pin designs all over the front and sleeves, although the pink hat that she currently knitted and the roughly hundreds of similar hats that lined the backseat were the obvious reasons why.

His sister put her current hat back in her purse and smiled. “What’s the score, Mystery Mace?”

Mace groaned and buckled his seatbelt. “Mab--”

“Mystery Mae-Mae.”

“ _Mystery Mae-Mae_ , we’re both on our own in the middle of the woods far from any other human being. Why are you insisting on codenames?”

“Uh, one, because it’s fun, and two, because now we won’t screw up and call each other by our real names in a heart-rending dramatic moment of danger.”

Mae-Mae turned the ignition and started to drive down the winding road through the forest. Mace reclined in the seat, his hands laced behind his head and his elbows out. He spared another glance to the backseat.

“How are the Craftzy sales going on the hats?”

Mae-Mae groaned. “Not well. I know the Spirit of Resistance beats hard in the hearts of the oppressed and at least a sizeable minority of white women but sadly few are willing to wear knit hats in the summer.”

“Not everyone has your commitment to fashion in the face of heatstroke, I guess.” Mace pulled his hat lower over his brow, wondered if he could catch a few winks of sleep before Mae-Mae found a diner. “Aren’t you a socialist now, anyway?”

“There’s no reason I can’t take my piece of the late capitalism pie. That’s why I’ve customized my hats for everyone. Pink hats. Brown hats. Hats that say ‘trans women are women.’ Hats with pig ears because I think they’re cute. And then I’ve got the specialized Mae-Mae patches: roses, black and red flags, donuts … I tried to make a specialized patch with a guillotine but I ended up getting a strike on my account for, like, inciting violence against the state or something.”

Mace yawned and closed his eyes. “You know, I admire your attempts to include everybody but it’s not as if the French Revolution went that well -- GAH!”

The ridiculous car screeched to a halt. Held fast to the seat by the belt, Mace watched with wide eyes as Mae-Mae tore out of the car in the direction of a lone house’s sign reading, “Tannen/Renny 2016: Make America Totally Rule Again!” Mae-Mae kicked the sign, spit on it, then jump-stomped on it with both feet a few times before running back to the car and zooming away with a screech.

“Mae-Mae, you do know that stunt both did nothing and is only going to fuel the persecution complex of whoever lives in that house, right?”

“I don’t care! It made me feel better!” Mae-Mae yelled.

Mace was about to explain something about how the election was over and as frustrated as they both were they could only affect the present, but he was surprised to see the hint of tears in Mae-Mae’s eyes.

“Bro,” Mae-Mae said, her voice starting to break. “Do you think our great-uncle voted for him?”

Mace groaned and rolled his eyes. They’d had a variation on this conversation several times for the past month. “Who cares?”

“Mace!”

“Honestly, both of them were probably so wrapped up in high-seas adventuring that I doubt either of them remembered to send in their absentee ballots.”

“But what if they did?”

“It doesn’t matter because Oregon went blue just like California, OK?” Mace knew he was yelling a bit now, but he was getting upset and frustrated. “It doesn’t matter whether or not they voted! It doesn’t matter that we weren’t old enough to vote last year! I can’t spend every day of my life wondering if our great-uncle felt some affinity for a fellow grifter or is too selfish to care or got offended enough as a Jewish person to write in a ballot for Nope that the election office wouldn’t count until months later anyway. It doesn’t matter! It’s been six months! All we can do is move forward and live our lives and be happy that we’ll be able to vote for Senator Fisher and Congresswoman LeRoi in 2018.”

“I don’t like LeRoi,” Mae-Mae’s eyes were still glassy. She sniffled hard. “I don’t like thinking that our great-uncle might have contributed to this. I don’t like feeling so scared and sad and angry all the time.”

“I don’t either,” Mace said, his voice quiet. He wanted to say more -- he wanted to ask her why she thought he was spending so much time in obscure parts of the country digging up demons. But Mace didn’t say anything because they were driving near to the town and he saw a crowd up ahead, saw what he thought was a posterboard with a double-X.

He clamped onto her shoulder. “Mae-Mae, turn the Hog-Car into the woods.”

“What?” she asked, then looked up ahead and screeched the tires as she turned to the left.

“Not that fast!” Mace exclaimed as the car bobbed in its off-roading into the woods.

“I’m sorry!” Mae-Mae turned off the car and yanked up on the emergency break.

Mace groaned and rubbed his eyes. “Oh my God, I knew this town was a bit conservative but … Shit. Can you check Cheeper?”

Mae-Mae pulled out her phone -- Mace stared distractedly at the Dummi Bear case and Cookie Cat charm dangling from it. Then he looked up and watched his sister’s face fall. “Yeah, there’s … there’s a rally in this town today. A big, big, ugly racist rally of racists in this town today.”

“And you didn’t know?”

“Uh, in case you haven’t noticed the cell-phone reception isn’t great out here,” Mae-Mae grumbled. “Why don’t you just re-download the app? You keep complaining you hate it and then whenever I look at it you’re hanging over my shoulder.”

“OK, you’ve owned me there, but …” Mace pulled off his hat, ran his hand through his hair before remembering that he should be hiding something as significant as his birthmark. He quickly pulled the hat back on his head. “You’re going to want to do something, aren’t you?”

Mae-Mae bit her lips and nodded.

“I feel like we should, too. But what can we do alone?”

“Find other people willing to stand up, I guess,” she said.

They both reluctantly exited the car. They tried, like Mace had earlier, to keep their steps light as they crept through the forest. At one point, Mae-Mae -- who had been walking ahead -- reached in back of her for Mace’s hand, and Mace was glad he didn’t have to admit to anyone else how grateful he was to take it. Mace looked to his right, could still see the tiki torches in the distance.

“There are so many people,” he whispered. “Probably hundreds.”

“There’s got to be some sort of counter-protest,” Mae-Mae said, although Mace wondered if she was trying to convince herself as much as him. “We just have to --”

“HEY!”

The unknown, masculine voice made Mace jump. He tried to control his heartbeat, but by the time the two white men had emerged from the woods he was already trying not to gasp for breath. On the surface, the men weren’t particularly horrifying. They were tall and thin, wore white polos with khaki pants along with their dorky round-rim glasses, and to Mace they seemed mostly indistinguishable except that one wore a fedora and the other wore enamel pins representing Hynkel’s Double-X symbol and other Third Reich medallions, as well a corrective eye-patch under his left lens. Yet Mace couldn’t help but stare with dread at the torches in their hand and the assault rifles strapped haphazardly across their bodies.

“Who are you?” asked the one with the hat.

“What are you doing?” asked the one with the patch.

“Let them answer the question, Klick!”

“My name isn’t Klick, Fink!”

“My name isn’t Fink, Klick!”

“You stupid, stupid … !” The patch man -- Fink? Or was it Klick? -- tried to reach for his gun, realized he couldn’t grab it securely with two hands while holding the tiki torch, then looked back and forth between the two of twins before growling and trying to get a grip on the weapon while holding the torch partly under his armpit. He made an angry noise toward his partner before awkwardly pointing the gun at the twins. “Enough of this! Raise your arms behind your heads. Are you part of our cause or are you both filthy Jews? Answer or die!”

Mace gulped and started to raise his hands behind his head, distraught that he was about to be killed by two racist morons. Then his sister let out a cry.

“WAUUUUUUUGGGH!” she yelled, her fists raised over her head as she barrelled toward the Neo-Hynkelites. She landed firm punches to both of their bellies before they could react, made both of them double over.

Yet Mace didn’t trust this to last. He leapt to Mae-Mae’s side and grasped her arm. “C’mon! We have to run!”

Mae-Mae nodded, but the both of them froze when they heard a click. They turned to see Klick -- or was it Fink? -- the one with the fedora, anyway, pointing a handgun at them. Mace pushed Mae-Mae to the ground with him, sure it was too late.

“Mraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaow!”

OK, Mace thought to himself, what the fuck was that?

Mace raised his head to see a large bat swing down on the fedora man, its wielder hissing loudly as her cat-ears twitched above her head. As fedora man fell to the ground with a graceless thud, the patch man lifted his own rifle, only to find himself being caught in a light-skinned black woman’s chokehold. He thrashed in her grasp, trying to break free of the grip, but a stocky brown-skinned woman emerged from the woods to rip away his gun and tiki torch. She threw away the first, shook the second in his face.

“This doesn’t belong to you!” she yelled, then cracked the torch across his cheek.

The patch man squealed in fear as the flame whipped across his face, but he became confident and mean when he saw it didn’t catch. “Y-Y-You call this tolerance?”

“Naw,” said the black woman, gripping his neck harder. “We ain’t here for that today, Adenoid.”

The patch man gasped for breath. When the black woman let go of him and he hit the ground, he didn’t get up again.

Mace slowly stood up, and Mae-Mae soon followed suit. Their three saviors took no notice at first -- they were more concerned with taking apart the AR-15s that the Neo-Hynkelites had dropped. Mace took the opportunity to get a good look at all of them.

For some reason the young black woman struck Mace as the leader of the trio. She had a relatively average height, a slender-to-medium build, and couldn’t have been older than her mid-twenties, but she was imposing in spite of that. Her dark brown eyes and large lips seemed set in a piercing and determined look, and her hipster-like style -- her thin leather jacket and skinny jeans, her sleeveless plain undershirt accented with gold jewelry, her natural hair gathered in two coiffures at the front and back of her head -- only gave the further impression that she knew exactly what she was doing.

The young brown-skinned woman -- Mace guessed now from the set of her eyes, her long and shiny black hair, and her earlier offense at the tiki torch that she was a Pacific Islander -- was dressed far more casually, with a short-sleeved, red and white-leaf patterned button-down shirt that she wore over large ripped jean shorts and sneakers. Her intimidation factor came from her build -- she wasn’t exactly fat but had a thick trunk and solid arms and legs that Mace wouldn’t want to mess with.

Yet the scariest of the three was definitely the one that had clobbered the fedora man over the head with her club. She was white, very thin and very tall -- had to be over six feet. Her hair was dyed black on one side and white on the other, then curled and then gathered into two ponytails on either side of her head. She wore patterned leggings and a black jacket with several political pins -- the V of the Big Brother Government, the Integral spaceship of One State, the black and red flags of the Anti-Hynks. Given her height and the angles of her face, Mace wondered if she was transgender, but he was actually more interested if the extra cat ears that popped up amid her hair, the sharpness of her canines, and the twitching tail that emerged from her back were something that she was born with or a later addition.

Looking at all three of them, Mace felt his mouth go dry. He’d had his share of crushes ever since he’d been 12, and while the girls he’d liked had all been very different, in his mind they all shared one distinct quality and that was --

“Wow,” Mae-Mae whispered next to him. “These girls are so freaking cool.”

“Yeah,” Mace said with an awkward laugh, trying not to blush. “Tell me about it.”

Mae-Mae started walking toward them, and Mace wanted to tell her to stop because he was sure that each one of these girls would think he was a loser dweeb but on the other hand the girls did save their lives and it would be both of their responsibilities to thank them for it.

As they approached, the black woman looked briefly up from the now-dismantled gun in her hands. “You kids all right?” she asked as she slipped the magazine into her jacket.

“Oh yeah.” Mae-Mae said with an uncomfortably wide smile. “My brother and I are peachy keen now that you three came along!”

Peachy keen? Mace thought with a wince. “Yeah, um. My name is Mace and this is Mae-Mae. We just really wanted to thank you for saving our lives.”

“Cool,” the white woman said with extreme uninterest. She turned to the black woman. “Hey, Sammi. Do you want me to take the magazine? Maybe it’ll be better if the pigs protecting the white supremacists find it on me instead of you.”

“Nah, Tabitha.” Sammi stood up and stretched. “You and Double L should just make sure to clonk them before they get to me.”

Mae-Mae gasped. “You mean the Neo-Hynkelites inducted poor, defenseless pigs into being their vicious attack boars? What monsters!”

Mace thwapped himself in the face and Mae-Mae realized her mistake.

“Oh … you mean police and not actual pigs.” She laughed awkwardly. “I … I knew that. B-But wait, that’s terrible!”

“Well, welcome to reality, white kid,” Sammi said. She cocked her head back toward the woods. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

The trio started moving when Mae-Mae got in front of them, palms outspread. Mace paused, but then followed her sheepishly. “Wait! My brother and I want to help you. We … we owe you one, or something.”

Tabitha rolled her eyes and Double-L groaned.

“How old are you two?” Sammi asked.

“17,” Mae-Mae said.

“We’ll be 18 in a few months, though,” Mace added.

Sammi looked over Mae-Mae’s safety pin sweater. “Well, maybe y’all better stick to posting on hidden MyFace groups for that time. We’re dealing with dangerous people, here. This is an operation for folks dedicated to smashing fascism, not some weekend activists who want to hold up a sign, go out for brunch and think things would be any different if Nope were President.”

Mace frowned. “I don’t think that’s fair--”

Mae-Mae laughed a bit too loudly. “Whaaaat? That is totally not us. Danger’s practically our family name, right Mace?”

Mace coughed and scratched the back of his neck. “Well, we have fought monsters, fake mystics and interdimensional beings hellbent on destroying all of reality … so, yeah?”

Tabitha scoffed. “What, are you like one of those obnoxious teen twin adventurers?”

“Um, kind of …” Mace said with a shrug. “Also, we’re half-Jewish and were raised by California hippies who drove hybrid cars as soon as they could afford them if that stacks the deck?”

Mae-Mae nodded enthusiastically. “And we are very, very mad at that British chocolate company that used to have a factory operated by tiny slaves for talking all our water.” She raised her fists in the air. “Free the little people! Death to capitalism! Water is life!”

The trio stared at her for a few minutes.

“You’re overdoing it,” Mace muttered to her.

“Shut up,” she muttered back.

Double-L shrugged. “I think we should take them along. They are privileged haoles, but this girl is a lunatic, and I respect that.”

Sammi rolled her eyes. “Fine, whatever. But,” she pointed a finger at the two of them, “if you two are in on this, you better listen to me. And if you do _anything_ to make the cops more aggressive toward us …”

The twins shook their heads violently.

“No, no!” Mace said.

“Absolutely no way!” Mae-Mae said.

Sammi gave them a quick nod. They followed her deeper into the forest, but Mace wondered exactly what they had gotten themselves into.

~*~*~

Mina had to admit she didn’t understand the point of it all.

Orlando and Dr. James sat next to each other on two bean-bag chairs, video game controllers in their hands. On the television screen, two ugly, yellow-faced fighters, each with two heads, punched and kicked each other in accordance with Orlando and James’ button-mashing. Mina watched both of them from her space on the couch next to Rob, who had made some overtures to her previously but Mina had been having more trouble than usual pretending an interest in him, so they ended up just watching the video game when they weren’t participating. Mina had previously made an attempt at the game and failed horribly, but Orlando seemed to be doing well in a way that had first amused James (“You’re pretty good for a girl,” he had said) but soon angered him, to the point that when Orlando’s long-haired, large breasted woman had bested James’ masked man, Orlando leaped to her feet with a cheer while James threw down the controller.

“Ugh, this game is bullshit, anyway!” James yelled.

Rob rolled his eyes. “You’re just saying that because you lost.”

“Uh-uh. It’s ridiculous that you can know the moves of this game and then get killed by someone hitting a bunch of buttons.”

Mina yawned. “Isn’t it all hitting a bunch of buttons?”

James glared at her, but Rob spoke up before James could say anything.

“You know that every fighting game in the history of fighting games can be won by the dumb luck of someone pounding on the controller and not knowing the move set. Don’t be a jerk.”

Orlando laughed. “Don’t worry about me, Rob. I’m long used to sparring partners losing their tempers.”

Rob squinted at her. “I thought you said you never played video games before.”

“Oh, um, I mean I trained in fencing as a … as a child … how about another round, James?”

The title screen with the four hideous fighters flexing at each other disappeared as Orlando and James chose a new fighter. Mina heard Rob yawn and felt his hand around her shoulder. She leaned into him in response, but was relieved when she heard a little buzz go off in her ear.

Mina shrugged herself out of Rob’s grasp. “Excuse me, I need to use the lavatory,” Mina said, trying to ignore Rob’s disappointed expression.

Mina crept down the hallway briskly but carefully. One of the first times she slipped away from the others to see if she could find any available paper files at D&D she ended up tripping Deidre’s surveillance system and getting an earful from the aggressively sunny lady about the importance of guests knowing where they are at all times. (It made Mina’s skin crawl, reminding her of the cheerful, regimented blur that had constituted her days in Coote’s.) However, in the past week (and with the help of a device for the purpose loaned to her by Agent C), Mina had learned the location of all of the surveillance system’s trip points and hidden cameras. She snuck into a dead spot near the men’s bathroom and pushed a finger inside her ear, quelling the buzz. Mina deliberately coughed twice and heard Agent C’s voice over the ear-radio in return.

“I want you to head to the space observatory,” Agent C said as Mina let down her hand -- at this point the line between them would last until Agent C “hung up,” for lack of a better term. “We think there may be hardware there capable of creating at least a rudimentary version of the force-field.”

“How do I get there?” Mina whispered.

“There’s a barely-used service staircase near the back left side of the building. If you take a right and then a left you’ll hit the hallway that’ll lead you right to it.”

Mina didn’t respond, and didn’t say anything until she reached the hallway, still keeping her eye out for any hidden cameras just to be on the safe side. As soon as the stairwell door closed behind her she spoke to Agent C again.

“What have you learned on your end?” Mina asked.

Agent C sighed. “Well, that cache of internal memos you swiped two days ago have been pretty, um … eye-opening.”

“In what way?” Mina started climbing up the stairs -- four flights it looked like, not too bad.

“Well, Dr. Dex’s public reputation is … I guess eccentric is the best way to put it. There’s a whole subgenre of TubeTube videos of him screaming at people at press conferences for asking basic questions and calling them idiots. And you don’t even want to see the fights he picks with people on Cheeper …”

“Sounds like a scientist after Tannen’s heart,” Mina grumbled.

Agent C let out a dark chuckle. “Our worry is that Dr. Dex is actually intelligent. We knew he was close to creating the force-field. We didn’t know how close. He’s accounted for every mainstream scientist’s objections to the practicality of the project, if not the cost and the environmental impact. It has to do with several different energy centers that could presumably put up a network of interlocking force-fields, which would make imports and customs still doable. He also has ideas for making the force field pervious to human DNA but impervious to anything resembling an alien.”

“And I suppose that’s not accounting for hybrids or the aliens who can functionally pass as human?” Mina asked.

“Probably not. Actually, since my shapeshifting comes from alien tech but allows me to change my DNA I’m almost curious to try it out myself.”

Mina smiled despite herself. “Well, curiosity killed the feline DNA, didn’t it?”

Agent C genuinely laughed that time. “You know … I never actually tried to change into a cat. It was my friend -- the one you saw me as -- who tried that form. She liked it because the cat’s instincts were really self-confident and arrogant … it kind of fit her personality, I guess.”

The sadness in Agent C’s voice was one that Mina recognized. She was nearly at the top of the stairwell at this point, but she stopped to talk. “It’s … difficult to miss your team, even when you know their faults.”

“I miss them every day,” Agent C said, almost too soft for Mina to hear. Then she sighed. “At least in your case your team left you. I left my team. Now they’re likely all dead while I’m alive … and I have to live with that.”

“I’m sorry,” Mina said. Granted, she personally wondered if making a foolish decision that got her put away in an abusive psychiatric facility for years was really her team leaving her, but she didn’t want to sound defensive at this moment. She didn’t really know Agent C’s story beyond that she and her close childhood friends had fought an invading race of alien brain-slugs for years when they were mere pre-teens, and the pain in Agent C’s voice whenever she brought up the topic made Mina not want to press her further.

“It’s fine. Just let me know what you can find in the observatory after you’re out. I’ll check back with you in a bit.”

A buzz vibrated in Mina’s ear as the line went dead. Mina took a deep breath and opened the door slowly. She took a step inside, then realized she wasn’t alone.

D&D Labs’ summer intern sat beneath what looked like an enormous telescope that opened out into the roof of the observatory. At her right hand sat her omnipresent purple smartphone and a pad of yellow notebook paper that she scribbled something on. Mina was about to sneak away when the intern turned toward her, the chair swivelling with her body.

“Oh, hey! You’re … Ellen, right? Are the guys looking for me or something?”

Mina thought for a moment about accepting that as an excuse -- after all, it would certainly have gotten the intern out of the room. Yet she really didn’t want to risk any long-term repercussions for the mission if James and Rob realized she’d lied. They’d been suspicious enough about the her and Orlando suddenly having their cell phone numbers. “No, no. I … I guess I have to admit I always wondered about the observatory and decided I wanted to see it for myself.”

The intern shrugged. “You probably could have just asked them to show you. I bet they’d love it. You could ooh and ahh, tell them how smart they are, pretend to laugh at their the telescope-is-my-dick jokes, that kind of thing …”

“You know, you always seem so charming in our brief interactions,” Mina said sarcastically. She grabbed the doorknob. “I’ll come back later, if you wish.”

“Oh brother, I don’t give a shit.” The intern groaned and scooted the swivel chair to the right, picking up her phone as she did so. “Look at whatever you want. I’m just here for the college credit and because my family thinks I need a positive outlet in my life or something.”

Mina tried not to appear too outwardly displeased. She guessed the teenager genuinely didn’t care about what she did, given how quickly the intern became entranced by her phone. Still, Mina didn’t relish the idea of not being able to do anything too conspicuous now that she’d gotten the chance to be up here. She glanced around at the computers and other equipment surrounding the telescope, looking for any stray notes that may lead to an indicator of what machine could be hacked or a new avenue to explore. Mina wished she could surreptitiously take some pictures ...

Then Mina caught sight of the intern’s yellow notebook paper. She didn’t know what she’d expected to see -- perhaps some sort of scientific figures and formulas. Instead, she saw multiple columns, each topped with an underlined header reading “Lion House,” “Wolf House,” “Dragon House,” “Rose House” or “Wacko Religious Cult Deer House.” Beneath the headers were a list several names, a few with crowns, others with arrows that pointed to another house and read “alliance.”

Looks like a bunch of complicated nonsense, Mina thought. She shrugged and -- not expecting to find much but curious anyway -- looked into the telescope.

Mina immediately gasped. She’d expected to see some sort of constellation. Instead, she found herself looking at a medieval city, complete with buildings of stone and thatch, a surrounding wall, and a large red castle on a hill.

“What?” the summer intern asked, surprised at Mina’s outburst. Then when Mina looked at her she seemed to realize what was going on. “Oh … I forgot I was looking at that at the time.”

“Is this … Am I actually looking into the past with this?” Mina asked.

The intern shook her head and got up from the chair. “No, this is actually another planet.” She reached for a small touchscreen on the side of the telescope. “Okay, I just zoomed out. Take a look again.”

Mina did. Sure enough, she was staring at two unfamiliar continents surrounded by blue oceans. While the vertical, elongated continent did remind her of her home island, the larger, rectangular continent to the west bore no resemblance to Eurasia. “Oh my …” Mina said, moving away from the eyepiece and turning back toward the intern. “How far from Earth is this?”

“Pretty damn far. Honestly, it’s like, so far away that we may not be able to see what’s really happening on the planet now even with the telescope. This might be their Dark Ages or something. But there are a lot of planets that bear a creepy resemblance to our own.” The intern tapped again a few times on the touchscreen. “Here, check this out.”

Mina looked into the eyepiece again. “I see … a flat world held up by four elephants riding on a turtle?”

“Oh shit. Sorry. Wrong coordinates. How about now?”

The glass fogged up and when it re-focused she saw what looked like a Japanese or Chinese city built around a bay, its skyscraper-filled peninsulas connected by several bridges.

“It’s … it’s extraordinary,” Mina said as she pulled away from the eyepiece.

“The people who live there are even cooler. Some of them can, like, shoot fire from their hands and create tidal waves and stuff,” the intern said. Mina watched as the intern plopped back into her chair, her arms crossed across her chest. “Not that they’re all great. Or that the people on the medieval world are great. Most of them are real assholes, actually. Maybe it’s just nice to be caught up in some other world’s problems for once.”

Mina watched the intern. She was tempted to dismiss this all as teenage cynicism and yet she remembered her last years in England before the Big Brother government rose and she and Allan fled the country, remembered the optimism that had quickly dwindled into creeping, omnipresent dread and horror. “The course of history has its highs and lows wherever you are.”

“Well, it looks pretty fucking low right now,” the intern grumbled. “I’m doing everything I can not to constantly refresh Cheeper.”

Mina frowned. “It may be best not to put too much stock into what the Tannen writes on the Internet.”

“Tannen?” the intern’s eyes bulged. “Oh God, what did he say about what’s going on in Indiana?”

“What’s going on in Indiana?” Mina asked.

The intern’s face grew pale. “You mean you don’t --?” the intern scrambled for her phone, tapped on its screen a few times, then turned it toward Mina.

Mina took the phone gingerly, brought her hand to her mouth as she saw what was happening. The intern stood next to Mina, hung over her shoulder as they both watched the live video feed.

Mina hadn’t seen anything like this since the 1940s. A huge crowd of Neo-Hynkelites, most carrying tiki torches, had set up a stage in the woods. On the stage were four figures -- a dark haired young white man with a van dyke beard stuffed into an ill-fitting suit, a very fat white man in a red polo shirt and khakis, a white woman with long, unruly red hair wearing a striped shirt of alternating purple and green, and a sad, hideous frog-man.

“Let it be known, my white brothers and sisters,” the man with the van dyke beard said into his microphone. The sound equipment only just allowed to be heard over the crowd of furious supporters and a strange song that Mina wondered was actually from some unseen counter-protesters. “This unruly rabble which stands against us is committing nothing less than an attack on the free speech that they claim to uphold. We will not be silenced! We will not have the country we built taken back from us --”

“Oh my God, Julian Drache, you’re fucking British! Why don’t you go back to your own god-damned country?” the intern screamed at the screen. When Mina shot her a glance, however, the intern looked a bit sheepish.

“Sorry.”

Mina shrugged. “It’s fine, I’m on a visa.”

Drache continued his speech. “We have already won! Tannen allowed this to happen. Tannen has elevated our voice. The globalist forces in the lying news media, in this country’s totalitarian universities, in the sinister millionaires who bankrolled these hideous, unruly activists, will no longer be able to --”

In that moment, the screen went white as several tiki torches suddenly spit enormous flames which shocked the Neo-Hynkelites holding them. Some dropped the torches. Others started screaming. The woman on stage tried to grab Julian Drache’s microphone and say something, but the flames flared again, and then the screen went dark.

A message popped up on the video player saying the live feed had been disconnected. Mina found it hard to breathe. She looked over and found the intern staring back at her, her mouth dropped open in shock.

“What the hell?” the intern asked.

Mina suddenly heard another buzz over her earpiece. She pressed it without thinking.

“Um, hey …” Agent C said. “Is this a good time to talk?”

End Part Three.


End file.
